


near/north

by riverbanks



Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Black Emporium Exchange 2016, F/F, Implied Relationships, Pre-Relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-24
Updated: 2016-09-24
Packaged: 2018-08-17 02:59:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,383
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8127769
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/riverbanks/pseuds/riverbanks
Summary: They’ve been dancing around each other for so long that Cassandra doesn’t know if they’d even know how to properly face one another now.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [storiofmylife](https://archiveofourown.org/users/storiofmylife/gifts).



They meet at different points of their lives -Leliana is still running from something, Cassandra is still looking for reasons to stay.

They’re polar opposites in almost everything, and most days it’s hard to stand each other in council, but Justinia relishes on their differences. Their different natures, points of view and ways of thinking up hard answers to problems that can’t be easily solved give Justinia perspective, she says, keeps her own views balance, gives weight to her decisions.

They’re both different sides of the same coin in the great game of influences, but it doesn’t feel exactly righteous to be, on most days, just the flip side of some holy, world-changing gamble.

# -

They’re not friends by any definition of the word, but living half their lives around each other brings a familiarity Cassandra finds in few places elsewhere, and some days she’d rather fight the demons she already knows than the unknown lurking at the edge of every shadow.

 _Join me_ , she asks with half a smile, heading out the manor’s backdoors. Leliana raises her a curious eyebrow every time, but picks up her knives and follows suit.

There are sparring grounds behind the Divine’s manor in the ever snow-covered hills of Val Firmin, where the templars of Justinia’s honor guard train in the morning, but this late at night there’s nothing but damp mud on the grounds and the dim light of torches outside.

What they do is not sparring. There’s clashing, and dodging, and parrying, and there’s even an element of practice in it -it’s important for Cassandra to keep herself fast and sharp enough to face an assassin as much as it’s important for Leliana to keep herself resilient enough to face a knight- but it’s not about the fighting as much as it is about exhausting each other, striking and dodging and wearing each other’s defenses down until they’re both so tired and out of steam that they just agree to stop and gives themselves some time to breathe. For now.

Leliana leaves in the morning with some urgently important and terribly secretive mission to fulfil Maker knows where, and when they don’t see each other for several weeks after these nights, Cassandra finds herself eventually missing the sound of their arguments in the restless silence of the Grand Cathedral’s walls.

# -

Cassandra agrees, in theory, in the beginning,  that their different roles serve different purposes and Justinia needs the pull and push, the weight and counterweight, that the Divine can’t thread one line alone when the world draws so many around them. But as the years go by the balance starts to shift, and it gets increasingly harder and harder to make herself heard -her words and her warnings fall on deaf ears, and Cassandra’s not sure when exactly she lost Justinia along the way, but she knows when the Spire falls that the rope gave way right under her hands.

She doesn’t resent Leliana, not quite, not right then. But she’s running out of reasons to stay.

Justinia sends them on wild goose chases across the continent, looking for Wardens that haven’t been seen in years, looking for heroes who don’t want to be found. It’s a fool’s errand, chasing aimlessly after ghosts as the world falls apart around them, and Cassandra can see the same thought in Leliana’s increasingly exasperated face, but neither of them will bring to words what lies well understood between them.

“I’m not certain this was a good idea,” Cassandra says as they ride down the steep curves along the outer walls of Soldier’s Peak, the gates shutting behind them with an urgency that echoes through the woods of the Coastlands. The Wardens make no effort to veil just how unwelcome their presence is, how much they do not want any part with the Chantry’s business.

Leliana does not answer. Her jaw is set, hands gripping the reins like she could snap them in half, and the look in her eyes is something Cassandra can’t begin to describe. She takes it as a betrayal, but from the way the Wardens shun them with no room for questions, Cassandra’s not sure there was ever a promise in there to break.

“Are you sure that’s a good idea?” Leliana asks her, two months later, as they set sail from the port of Kirkwall, leaving behind a city still aflame and drowning in its own chaos, and taking with them the Knight-Commander, one of Kirkwall’s last figures of authority left behind.

Cassandra watches Cullen from a distance, silently struggling with the nausea partially coming from the ship’s motion, but no doubt partially from the lyrium withdrawal too. She can tell the signs all too well - she’s done too many interrogations and seen too many Templars deprived of lyrium before. It’s nothing to be proud of now, but it used to mean something, long ago.

The dwarf helps Cullen to his feet and walks him back inside as his tremors increase and his face drains of all color, looking like he might either faint or start lashing out in a moment, and Cassandra shrugs lightly, turning her eyes back to the sea. “I’m not sure of anything anymore.”

# -

Justinia is the one thing that keeps them together, but also the same thing that pulls them apart.

When they lose Justinia, the two hurt as one, and each other is all they have left.

The Inquisition is a leap of faith, a shared madness that creeps upon them like a fever and takes shape under their joined hands as they split into separate lives, at last. They’re think and do, halves that don’t quite make a whole. That’s how it’s been most of their lives -left and right, here and there. Leliana advises, gambles and sets wheels into motion, pushing the weight of the world where it needs to go from the safety of words whispered into the right ears; Cassandra follows, and bleeds, and burns her hands raw on the grip of her sword to shape the world as it should be, cutting down shadows where they most need light. It is as it’s always been, but the paths they follow now are not the same at all.

They don’t remember Justinia the same because they never knew Justinia the same, and years into the future, when they talk about the Inquisitor, their stories and memories of the person behind the title won’t be the same either.

But they have purpose now, and that’s more than Justinia ever gave either of them in the end.

# -

Between meetings and travels and missions and schedules, they hardly see each other anymore. They miss each other as the Inquisitor comes and goes, orbiting the same star without crossing each other’s paths, and at some point Cassandra realizes it’s been so long since she and Leliana had a good, all-out argument that she misses their old spats.

 _Join me?_ Leliana asks one night, leaning against the doorframe of Cassandra’s room, knives sheathed in a leather belt she hasn’t seen the other wear in months, and that’s when Cassandra takes a good look at Leliana’s face and realizes for the first time how much she has aged, and changed, since they first met -they both have.

She takes her sword and follows Leliana outside, through the lower wings, out of the main tower and through the damp gardens, and into the sparring grounds the Inquisitor had built before the Templar barracks. It’s late, and the soldiers are gone, but helmets and practice wooden swords still scatter around. Shields branded with the Sword of Mercy rest against wooden posts, and Leliana clicks her tongue quietly as they pass those by. Cassandra figures whatever _that_ means, it’s not worth taking up with the Inquisitor at this point. What’s done is done, and there’s still much more to do ahead.

There’s a clash of blades, a push and shove, the sharp clanging of steel against steel echoing in the half-deserted courtyard, and still what they do is more a dance than a fight. They’ve been dancing around each other for so long that Cassandra doesn’t know if they’d even know how to properly face one another, should that day ever come.

Leliana’s form is unusually sloppy, her footwork unsure like Cassandra’s never seen before, and in one particularly heavy swing, Cassandra has to pull her own arm back.

“What happened in Valence?” she asks, shaking her arm loose from a minor cramp that threatens to settle after the careless maneuver.

“Nothing,” Leliana answers, regaining her footing and flicking her knives once, twice, tightening her grip on them. Her face is blank, a void of emotion Cassandra knows well.

“Hm. You won’t talk about it, and neither will the Inquisitor,” Cassandra pushes, just to see how far she can take this. “It does not seem like nothing.”

Leliana fixes her with the cold stare she usually reserves for prisoners under interrogation, and Cassandra turns away, adjusting the weight of her shield.

“What happened in Caer Oswin?” Leliana teases, and Cassandra hates her a little bit.

“You read the report,” she answers, and Leliana chuckles then, clicking her tongue again.

“That’s not what I’m asking, is it?”

It’s Cassandra’s turn to stare at her, the grip on her sword tightening under her fingers and her feet planting firmly on the mud-covered ground. “Nothing,” she says, right arm swinging into a shallow cut Leliana easily dodges, before the left one slams the full weight of body into Leliana’s open side, sending her reeling back enough that the back-flick of her knife misses Cassandra’s face by several feet.

“What interesting lives we’re living these days,” Leliana says with a smile, looking up from where she ended taking a kneel to catch her breath from the blow. “Quite a bit of nothing happening, and yet we’re still here, no?”

Cassandra glances at her, and can barely hide the grin that comes to her lips.

“On your feet,” she calls, and for the first time in as long as Cassandra remembers these quiet nights they’ve been sharing for so many years, offers a hand to help her up.

# -

It’s never a competition between them, despite how the many brothers and sisters that fall on each of their sides try to frame it.

Neither of them ever nurtured any ambitions to the Sunburst Throne, but when their names are put forward, the notion begins to take root at the back of their minds until they start _wanting_ it. And yet, neither Cassandra nor Leliana ever make a rival out of each other -the more the wanting settles inside them, the more they understand why it settles inside the other, too.

It changes something between them. The entire half a lifetime they’ve known each other, lived around each other, they’ve been pieces, jagged halves of the same wheel, but suddenly they’re part of a larger puzzle anymore, they are both the game itself, and it’s freeing in a way that even watching the sky burst in half and bathe the work of a lifetime in blood and ashes wasn’t.

Cassandra has never felt so fractured and yet so whole in her life.

 _Join me_ , Leliana invites her one morning, gesturing to the breakfast laid out on the large wooden table in the rookery. Cassandra puts her sword and shield down and sits, helping herself to tea as Leliana sips on her cup, watching out the window as the sun rises over the battlements. It’s quiet in these early hours, and for a second as they share this moment, Cassandra remembers so many tables they’ve shared before, so many conversations they’ve never had.

“Tell me a story,” Leliana asks, a gentle, unguarded look in her eyes Cassandra hasn’t seen in more years than she count.

“Aren’t you the storyteller?” Cassandra asks with a shrug, her elbows resting over the table, and she scoffs when Leliana frowns at her. “Be as it may, you know all there is to know about me.”

“Yes, I know all _about_ you,” Leliana answers with a small sigh. “But I hardly know _you_ , yes?”

Cassandra watches her for a long moment, looking for something she’s not sure what is, until it settles in that, no, she doesn’t. For all the years they’ve known each other, they barely _know_ each other. For all that Leliana has a full taly of her lineage, her personal history, her service record, details of her private life down to possibly her tastes in pastries and favorite meat cuts, it dawns on Cassandra that she hardly knows her, where it counts.

The reverse is, of course, just as true, but that’s never been a surprise to Cassandra. They understand each other as nothing alike and still just the same, but she has never known Leliana at all.

“I’ll tell you a story of mine, then” Cassandra finally agrees. “If you tell me one of your own.”

Leliana puts her cup down and crosses her fingers under her chin, adjusting her weight to face Cassandra better and listen. She shrugs lightly, a teasing smile lighting up her face.

“Fair enough.”

# -

This is how it happens in every romance novel she’s ever read: there’s a lonely lady with wistful eyes and a heart full of love to give, and a dashing knight who sweeps her off her feet and rides off into the sunset with fair lady on his arm. This -the candles, the poetry, the flowers- is how Cassandra imagines the theatre of love, even having known real love once, in a time that seems so distant now it might have happened in a different life, in a different world, to a different person who is not herself.  

This is how it happens in real life: they’re in Val Royeaux, in the Blue Palace as guests of the crown, waiting for the last remaining Grand Clerics to reach a decision at last, and it’s some time into the night way past the last bell when there’s a knock on her door.

Cassandra opens the door warily, sword always cautiously at hand, and lets her guard when Leliana walks in, looking for the world like she hasn’t slept in days.

Cassandra hasn’t, either.

She shuffles around the room, aimlessly, as Cassandra shuts the door behind her, lays her sword back on the desk. She watches Leliana pace around for a moment, and feels the weariness of the past weeks creeping up inside her, a yawn rising from her lungs.

“Did you need something?”

Leliana shakes her head lightly, her fingers tracing the cover of  the Chant of Light on Cassandra’s nightstand.

“Have they reached a decision yet?” and another shake of the head.

Cassandra watches as Leliana fiddles through the books on her desk, then steps back to the other end of the room and sits on the edge of her bed, crossing both hands over her lap and staring out the open window, the night sky brightly lit by the line of torches along the castle walls. She _has_ heard something, then.

“They’ll announce it in the morning,” Leliana says, and her voice is hoarse, as tired as they both feel. “This is the last night we spend as us. Do you ever wonder about that?

Left, right,” Leliana smiles. “When the morning comes, one of us will go, one of us will stay. There won’t be anything tying our lives together anymore. Do you wonder about that?”

Cassandra wonders about many things, but she can’t say that come to mind before now. Now that it does, though, it feels raw in her throat, it feels a bit like losing ground.

The last twenty years of her life have been spent being a weapon in someone else’s hand. The last ten, being Leliana’s counter-weapon, on the other hand. She thinks of going, and thinks of staying, and thinks of the spaces Leliana has filled around her over the years, of the spaces she has taken around her. She thinks of filling these spaces with void, with nothing, of turning around and not seeing the glimpse of red hair under the hood, not hearing the same voice and not having the same arguments week after week, month after month, year after year. She thinks of habits, and comfort, and finds an unsettling fear in herself of being truly alone at last.

“I wonder,” Leliana sighs, her smile wistful as her eyes meet Cassandra’s for a moment, then turn back to the night sky outside.

It takes a handful of steps, and then Cassandra is sitting on the edge of her bed too, the two side by side as they haven’t been in such a long time. Thoughts come to mind, empty offers -what if you were my left hand from now on? What if I was your right hand?- but Cassandra dismisses them before they take shape. The _only_ way they have ever worked is as separate parts of the same whole. They will never work as anything else.

“Stay, then,” she finds herself saying. “If this is the last night we have....”

...then it feels right to be here in each other’s company, if only until morning comes.

Leliana shakes her head, her shoulders shaking slightly too with a soft chuckle, but it’s not a no.

In real life, there are no knights on a mighty steed, no wine or poetry into the night, but there is this: the one constant Cassandra’s had in her life in the past ten years, that the world hasn’t managed to take away from her yet, still sits here beside her at the end of the line. Rests her head on Cassandra’s shoulder, takes her hand into hers, and makes it to the sunrise where they lose their names, still, after all this time, with her.

The candle on her nightstand burns out, but the night’s still long ahead.

# -

Cassandra is not Cassandra anymore. Leliana has another name as well. Their hair is longer, their voices softer, there are more wrinkles under their eyes, but beneath the names they’re still the same.

They shape the world now, and it feels like justice, but the question still haunts her - for whom?

They come and go out of each other’s lives, two at last, each herself, whole. And still it seems they can’t leave each other’s orbits, drawing apart and coming back together every time there is a new report, every time there is a new council, every time a word or insight is needed from one who sees the signs in the trees to another who overlooks the forest, and some days it’s as if nothing’s changed. As if they’re still the same, kneeling on the same step, even with a throne between them.

They met at different points of their lives, but somewhere along the way they’ve come to the stand on the same place.

“Leaving already?” Cassandra asks, braiding her hair and watching the sun rise by the window sill.

Leliana smiles from the doorway, and closes the door behind her without a word. She’ll be back.

That last night never did come, in the end.  

# -

It’s a year past the Exalted Council when they meet again since the last time, and if there is a more appropriate place than this, than the buried catacombs of what was once Haven, where everything started -where everything _changed_ , the irony doesn’t escape any of them.

The Inquisitor looks away, distracted by something Commander Cullen points out on the map, and Cassandra looks up to find Leliana smiling at her, the familiar small smirk and glint in her eye making Cassandra smile, a little bit, too.

This cell is a reminder to them, of battles won and lost, of loss but also change. Of a sideways race in opposite directions that ended the day they started their own path here, together.

 _Are you done running_ , Cassandra wants to ask, but the truth is she has known the answer far longer than she’s willing to say. And it dawns on her, as her smile widens and becomes almost a dry, quiet laugh they share across the table, even as no one else looks up to see what passes between them then, that this here, is a good enough reason to stay.


End file.
